


to deprive of feeling

by maelidify



Series: Space Interludes [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Platonic Tension, TW for ontari mention, also a gore mention, ark fic, murphy is in a coma and everything hurts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 20:39:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16145081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: Emori can’t afford enemies in this small group of strangers, even if the Azgeda spy already is one.





	to deprive of feeling

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Emori Appreciation Week day six: Home

The word  _anesthetize_  floats in front of Emori’s eyes and she wonders if the artificial light could sear it into her vision. A tattoo, a strange scar, to keep thinking of this word. **  
**

She and the Azgeda spy have been learning to read in English from a medical dictionary. They don’t speak to one another while the leader, Bellamy, takes a pen and draws out the letters and forms them into separate words, into sentences. He holds the pen like it’s natural to speak silently in dark lines on paper, like it’s natural that his only two pupils are exiles who cannot look at one another. Like it’s natural that John is sleeping in the other room, and has been sleeping for two weeks, and might not wake up.

She sleeps next to him every night, listening to his heartbeat, reminding herself what it means. He’s still fighting. He’s always fighting.   
  
Right now, she’s in the mess hall, and writing utensils are scattered on the table, untouched. Bellamy senses something when he gently tugs the dictionary away from her. “Do you want to go back to your room?” he asks, and she just stares at where the dictionary was. The ghost of the book of words, the memory imprint.  

For the first week, she didn’t leave John’s side. But:   
  
“I feel so useless,” she murmurs. The spy looks at her sideways, as though to say  _that’s because you are_.   
  
“We all do,” Bellamy admits. “But my gut tells me he’s going to pull through this.”  
  
It isn’t helpful, but it is honest. A thought flashes through her mind: this man once wanted John to die. No. Not a useful thought, not a relevant one. She tightens her grip on her pencil, which she has transferred to her gloved hand. It snaps in her grip, and she looks at it blankly.   
  
John and Raven are the only inhabitants of this ship who have seen her hand, but she knows the spy is aware of what it means. She knows it means death, and Emori can see it in her gaze right now when it travels to the shards of broken wood.   
  
“Now isn’t the time for this,” the spy says.

“For  _what_?” Emori snaps, and instantly regrets her lapse of control. She can’t afford enemies in this small group of strangers, even if the Azgeda already is one.

But the other woman looks at her carefully. Not with kindness, but with observation. “It isn’t the time for learning this language. What you need is a fight.”

Azgeda is a hard culture. Emori knew a fellow scavenger once who came from their lands, a small man named Gamto who was born with two noses on his face, one of them ineffectual. From him, she found out the Ice Nation doesn’t leave their frikdreina in the woods for animals– they throw them in the cold ocean.   
  
When she and the Azgeda were thrown together to work on the rocket, she’d tried not to think about this. It wasn’t useful, and the other woman was numb, unthreatening, distracted by her own turmoil. But in the relative peace on the Ark, the loud silence between them has been growing, and Emori often can’t help but remember how her king had grabbed her in Becca’s lab, holding a knife to her throat and offering her as a sacrifice to their experiments.

Sometimes she even remembers the woman the Azgeda would have chosen for Heda.     
  
These memories come at odd times, while she’s sleeping alone with John unwakeable beside her or working on wires with Raven, hands shaking. And looking at the spy, the memories resurface: the king’s cool indifference, frostbite scars on Gamto’s fingers. John waking up in the middle of the night, shaking, a hand to his throat.   
  
The spy has been in palpable shadow since their arrival on the ship, carrying something she still cannot put down. Her face masks pain strikingly well; Emori can recognize this ability, this cold kind of training. The woman is about to erupt, and she’s chosen well for her target. She thinks she has chosen someone weak.   
  
These are the first words directly exchanged between them since they left Earth.

“Maybe you’re right,” Emori says, meeting the woman’s eyes, and it is decided.

—

The room used for sparring is next to the mess area where Bellamy sits with a disgruntled Raven. Their two shapes are hunched over the table, where they have diagnostic printouts spread out, and their voices are low in the background. Emori knows they’re keeping out of the way but keeping an eye on them; she can tell Bellamy has a reluctant closeness with Echo, and Raven is the closest thing Emori has to a friend now that John is…   
  
When she punches, the spy blocks it easily.   
  
“You can do better than that,” she mutters and Emori ducks under the returning punch, which she knows the other woman threw sloppily on purpose. She’s trying to fool her into a false idea of her fighting patterns.   
  
Emori swings her leg, aiming to trip the Azgeda, but she catches the kick and aims a successful blow to Emori’s shin. The pain is dull, ringing through her body in a way that grows and aches. She ignores it, standing up and backing up a few steps, reevaluating.   
  
“Be smart,” the woman says in their own language. “Show me why it is you’re still alive.”   
  
“I don’t have to prove anything to you,” Emori responds quietly, the rage simmering into her next blow, which connects with the spy’s shoulder even though it was aimed at her chin. They aren’t meant to aim for the face in sparring, but neither of them have regard for those skaikru rules.    
  
“Show me,” the woman says again,  _tich ai_ , and the sentiment is ambiguous, but her eyes are clouded with something harsh, bitter.   
  
There is no war paint here on the Ark and the spy’s face is strange for an Azgeda, free of customary scarring. A blank slate full of unknowable things. Emori throws two more punches hard, knowing they’ll be blocked, and takes a blow to the stomach from the other woman.   
  
She allows it to knock her off her feet, to take the wind from her, and curls up on the ground. A chair scrapes in the background, and a brace creaks. Before Raven can finish her approach, the spy aims a kick at the back of her knees and Emori completes her trap, snapping her legs closed on her foot, knocking her to the ground and springing over her. When Emori goes to punch her in the face, the woman halts her blow by grabbing her wrist. Her left wrist. This was planned.   
  
“ _Fir in_?” Emori says, almost cruelly. Are you afraid, Azgeda? The spy’s face starts to pinch in something, disgust or anger, and she yanks the glove off Emori’s hand, throwing the fabric on the ground.

“How is it,” the woman says lowly, staring at Emori’s hand the way one might look at a bloody stump, “that you thought you deserved to live after being banished by your people?”   
  
Emori clenches her longer fingers, letting the tips of them brush the spy on the wrist. The woman flinches, and she takes satisfaction in that.

“I know why you hate me,” Emori hisses, still speaking their tongue. “I found a lover, a home, a family. Me, a frikdreina. You’re less than a stain because you have no one.”   
  
“There’s no family among the dead,” the spy says, and knocks her on her back, scrambling upright. Enraged, Emori jumps up and charges her with one shoulder, switching her weight at the last minute and attacking from the other side.

She hears Raven say, “ _cool the hell down, guys_ ,” and she’s closer, and Bellamy’s there, ready to interfere, to save them from themselves. The spy dodges her charge and grabs her around the middle; she turns in the grip, trying to loosen the hold and lock her arms around the woman’s head. They are both strong, and as they tangle tightly, Emori notices the woman is shaking. It would almost be an embrace, were it not so violent, and maybe this woman was right. Maybe the medical dictionary was a ghost compared to the copper, the bruising, the anger spilling and shaking. Maybe language is too fragile for this kind of pain.   
  
Anesthetize: to deprive of feeling. A cruel word.   
  
“I know there’s no family among the dead,” Emori says. “So do you.” She means to keep her fear masked, but her voice cracks on the last word. She is shaking too and the woman, Echo, cries out, and cries again, her voice loud in Emori’s ear, and there’s a cry in her own chest that emerges, violent, broken. From the corner of her eye, she sees Raven pause and walk away, nodding at Bellamy to follow.  

The two enemies hold one another, and beneath them the Earth still burns, and isn’t their home anymore.


End file.
